“Lessons From History” #1: Plymouth, 1620
THE SHORT VERSION: The Pilgrims tried communal farming for two years and nearly starved. Then they gave every family their own plot of land — and harvests soared. America’s first economic experiment ended in 1623, and it failed.
NOW THE FULL STORY:
When the Mayflower’s 102 passengers finally came ashore in December 1620, they’d already buried half their company at sea or in the first brutal winter. What most of us were never taught is that the colony came within a whisker of failing entirely — and it wasn’t the weather or the wilderness that nearly killed them. It was the system.
The Pilgrims were financed by London investors called the Merchant Adventurers, and the deal required everything the colonists produced — crops, fish, furs, timber — to go into a common storehouse for seven years. Every family worked the common fields, and everyone drew equal shares from the common store, whether they’d worked hard or hardly worked at all.
Governor William Bradford wrote about it plainly in Of Plymouth Plantation. He said the arrangement ‘sowed much confusion and discontent’ — the strong young men resented getting no more than the weak, and families with many mouths but few workers did fine while those who worked hardest got nothing extra. People started showing up late, doing the minimum, and letting others carry the load. Crops came in thin. In the summer of 1622 the colony went through another starving time.
So in the spring of 1623, Bradford did something radical: he ended the experiment. He ‘assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number,’ for them to farm as their own. His own words: ‘This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious.’
The change was immediate and dramatic. That year’s harvest was the best they’d ever had — so good that the colony began exporting corn. The lesson wasn’t complicated: when a family kept what it grew, everybody worked harder, planted more, and wasted less. When everything went into the common pot, nobody’s effort mattered and everybody coasted.
The investors’ seven-year compact ran its course in 1627, the colonists bought out the company’s shares, and Plymouth endured.
THE LESSON: The Pilgrims weren’t greedy capitalists — they were devout people trying to build a godly community, and they chose communal ownership with the best of intentions. It still failed. Rewarding work works. Pooling everything and dividing it equally doesn’t. America learned this in 1623, before America existed.
Tomorrow: the Soviet Union — what happens when the experiment is tried on 200 million people instead of 100.
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